Six Connotations of Sustainability in Civil and Construction Engineering: A Corpus Linguistics Study

This research explores the historic use of the concept of sustainability in civil engineering academic literature and identifies its conceptual evolution and connotative treatment over the last 40 years. We find that academic research addressing sustainability is exponentially increasing and that the focus on sustainability is enlarging from a primarily environmental perspective to include more social elements. Additionally, we propose a set of six connotations of sustainability: assessment, progress, permanence, abstractness, multidimensional, and intersectional. These connotations provide conceptual clarity for academics and practitioners in better-defining sustainability objectives and measuring outcomes. These connotations also promote more efficient collaboration with other necessary disciplines in the pursuit of project and societal-level goals. The research employs a novel use of computational corpus linguistics in CCE to identify and examine patterns of collocates associated with the word sustainability in a corpus of 335,020 peer-reviewed civil and construction engineering (CCE) scholarly abstracts published between 1981 and 2021. Demonstrating this research method is a contribution to CCE researchers systematically extracting meaning from large volumes of literature.